Super Scattergories

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If you love party games but can't stand other people, this modest offering might just be for you.

By IGN Staff

Scattergories is a game of words. You pick a letter at random -- by way of pressing the space bar -- and then are asked twelve clues to which you find words that start with the chosen letter. All you have to do is type in the first three letters and the game assumes it knows what you mean and fills in the rest of the word. As if that wasn't easy enough, it also compensates for common misspelling. This leaves open a rather sizable hole in the game whereby simply typing combinations of three letters will get you a correct answer eventually. There is a time limit -- sixty seconds -- so you can only do so much cheating but you can squeeze a lot of cheating into sixty seconds...cheater.

There are six rounds to go through and three different game types. The first two rounds are basic Scattergories. Then there's Scrutineyes whereupon choosing your letter you are shown a picture, sort of Mad magazine quality without being funny, in which there are twelve items that start with that letter. You have to find them. The fourth round is ScatterBrain, same as the basic game but the clues are in riddle form. Try to contain your excitement. Next comes Scattered Categories -- is it just me or does this seem a little repetitive? -- where using your mouse you match the words from the same category that starts with, you guessed it, the chosen letter. And finally there's Scattergories Knockout, the game they claim is twelve times more exciting because you have twelve different letters to use. I found this only about one-and-a-half-times as exciting but I'm a tough sell. And none too good at fractions.

The worst part of the game, by a large margin, is the announcer. Picture in your mind's-ear the love child of Regis Philbin, Jim Carrey and Robin Williams and then multiply the annoyance by ten and you'll be getting close to how I feel about this guy. He's constantly chattering away in the background doing some of the worst Carson, Sullivan and Clinton impressions I've ever heard as well as some other voices that are just plain terrible. You can turn down the volume of course but there's also this rather pleasant female voice that reads all the clues and it really helps you answer quickly if you hear them and read them. The music is also bad to but, once again, hearing the clues helped me too much to turn the volume down.

So how's the dictionary? Well there are words that you think should be there and aren't and other words that you just don't expect to see. In one game the clue was, "things that are in your mouth," and the letter was C. So after it wouldn't take the half dozen nasty answers I thought of, I put in CAN for canine teeth. The game took it but it said the answer was canker sores ¿ not one of the nasty answers I thought of but pretty disgusting none the less. And if the letter is B you can bet that the answer banana will be there at least once. "What's an ingredient of a banana split?" ¿wait, wait don't tell me -- or "A monkeys favorite food" or "Name a yellow fruit" are typical clues. Who could possibly guess what those diabolical fiends are looking for?

The game keeps high score for the Hot-Seat and Solo games if bragging rights are important to you -- and I think we all know they are. There are also hints for the kids -- or shameless adults. And as for the feel good aspect of the game the end screen has a meter that goes from yikes to not bad to great depending on how you did. If you place in the top ten scores then you did "great" but anything else seemed to get you a "not bad" and the game show host tells you better luck next time. Being curious I got a final score of zero to see if the meter would go the yikes and tell me to go back to school or read a book or something but it just went back to "not bad." Even if we can't all be winners, at least Hasbro is seeing to it that none of us have to be losers.

To add a little more fuel to the fire, there tended to be lots of repetition of answers or questions. In all, there isn't much variety to the game -- especially since the other game types are really similar. And you can't even play Scrutineyes or Scattered Categories without playing the whole six round game with the annoying voiceover. All that aside, this was fun for a few short games but it grows tiresome in the long run.

Based on the familiar pencil-and-paper game, the object of the game remains to find members of particular categories; each answer must start with the same letter. The computer version adds some complexity--there's now five different games, including picture identification, category matching, and simple word listing.